Video: Creating your own workflows with Visio

If you have Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium Edition, you will find there is another thing you can do with workflow in SharePoint. In fact, in the flowchart section, you actually have a type of Visio diagram you can create which is a Microsoft SharePoint workflow and this is not just for looking at it. It's actually useful for creating it. If I create that kind of drawing, I will find the options available to me are the Workflow Actions and Workflow Conditions, the same things I could get in SharePoint Designer.

In SharePoint 2010 Essential Training, author Simon Allardice demonstrates the full feature set in SharePoint 2010 and the necessary skills to be a SharePoint site administrator. The course shows how to use SharePoint, create sites and site collections, and plan and design sites and portals. It also covers Office integration, security and permissions, and advanced features such as document management and business intelligence.

Creating your own workflows with Visio

If you have Microsoft Visio 2010 Premium Edition, you will find there is anotherthing you can do with workflow in SharePoint.In fact, in the flowchart section, you actually have a type of Visio diagramyou can create which is a Microsoft SharePoint workflow and this is not just for looking at it.It's actually useful for creating it.If I create that kind of drawing, I will find the options available to me arethe Workflow Actions and Workflow Conditions, the same things I could get inSharePoint Designer.

So I could start to actually set out a workflow by starting off with the startprocess, then I could ask a condition such as checking if a file was a certainfile size, and performing certain actions such as sending an email, and thenstarting to connect those together.Now, it's not as fully featured as in SharePoint Designer but there is a lotof use to it, particularly if you are trying to communicate complex workflows to people.

However, there is a great thing that you can do that kind of ties in theSharePoint Designer and Visio side of things.I am going to go back over into SharePoint Designer where I had my workflow herecalled Check for Policies.What I am going to do is export to Visio.I would export to something called a Visio Workflow Interchange File or VWI,click Save, and I am just going to close down SharePoint Designer right now.It's quite tempting to think that what we could do is go and find that VWIdocument and double-click it, but it won't automatically open.

What I have to do is go into Visio and go into the Process section where wehave an open diagram and click Import.Find that VWI and click Open, and this is the workflow that we designed inSharePoint Designer.It begins with start, asks the condition about the name of it, then copiesthe list item, deletes the original item, sends an email, logs it to the history list.Now, you could start to even manipulate this.Let's say I am going to get rid of that Delete Item.

Just select it and hit the Delete key, and perhaps in its place I want to dosomething else here.I am going to, instead of deleting the original document, I am going to set afield in the current item.I am going to change its name.This is just to show you how we can start to manipulate this.Now again, if we are communicating this structure to people because we aregoing to be printing it out or showing it to folks, this is about as deep as we need to get.What I am going to do after I have created this is export it.I am going to export it out as Check v2, click Save, close down Visio, I don'tneed to save anything here, go back into SharePoint Designer.

I do need to obviously go back into the site that I was editing, go into myWorkflows section, and I have got the Import from Visio.I will go ahead and browse out to that second version that I had, click Open, click Next.It's telling me that a version of the workflow already exists on the site.Yes, I know. And click Finish to replace it. It looks good.Now, what I am actually seeing here is that the part that I had changed,this line here which originally said Delete current item, is now changed tothe Set field to value.

It doesn't know what value I want to set it to and what I am interested indoing here is setting the name to whatever it was before, but with the wordsMoved to HR policies as a comment at the start of it.So I am going to say set the field, the field I am looking for is Name, to avalue, and really I need to build this out.So I am going to click the ellipsis button here.So the comment that I want to put in, I will just put-in square brackets Moved.The square brackets aren't meaningful.

They are doing nothing special.They are just going to be injected into the name of this document.But I want to add the original name of the document.So I will hit the Add or Change Lookup, Current Item, Name, click OK, click OK,check it for errors, contains no errors, and I will republish it back.Now I can close this down, and going back to my Shared Documents library, thisis where the workflow is applied.I am going to upload another document that I shouldn't be uploading here.

Go and find another policy document, let's have the Travel Policy, click Open, click OK.We have that uploaded and what I am interested in doing is seeing did they getmoved to the HR Policies location?Yes, it certainly did.If I go back to my Shared Documents, we can see it's now been renamed toMOVED TO HR POLICIES LIB Travel Policy but because it's still around here,I could look at my Workflow History and see exactly what I have put in here.The little comment that I added. The document was moved to the HRPolicies document library.

So in a lot of cases you are not going to be using either SharePoint Designer orMicrosoft Visio, but you might be using a combination of both.I believe that Visio is very, very useful if you have got complex workflows thatyou want to communicate to people in a visual fashion, not necessarily alwaysfor editing in, because you will be able to do more in SharePoint Designer.that's what it's really designed for, but certainly very useful thing to havein your toolkit.

Q: In the "Adding a user to a site" movie, the instructor shows how to add a user to SharePoint and demonstrates by adding a user named “gini.” But gini is already set up and recognized by SharePoint. What if I have no users set yet? How can I add someone?

A: SharePoint doesn't store a separate user database; it wants to be pointed to an existing source of users, like Active Directory. If you don't have that, you need to first add your new users as local accounts on the Windows box you installed SharePoint on. Only then will you be able to give them permission on a SharePoint site.

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